A Quest to Find Canada’s Elusive Coastal Wolf

While working as a deckhand on a bear and whale-watching vessel off the west coast of Vancouver Island after high school, Bertie Gregory fell in love with the coastal wolf. After heartbreaking news that one of the wolves he photographed had been killed, Gregory knew he had to go back to help raise awareness for the conservation of the species. While searching for the elusive wolf, Gregory encounters a diverse array of other species, including bears, sea otters, and raccoons. Gregory takes the stage to share photos and stories from his time in the field shooting his web series "wild_life with bertie gregory."

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.

I'd like to start by telling you about this place. This is the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. And I was lucky enough to first visit this place back in 2011. And whilst I was there I fell in love with this animal. She is a female coastal grey wolf.

I don't know about you, but when I think of wolves I think of snow covered mountains. I think of Yellowstone National Park, of Ronan Donovan, a legendary wolf photographer. But these guys are completely different. They live off the ocean. Up to 90% of their diet comes from the ocean. They eat fish, barnacles, mussels, clams, even washed up whales. They live this incredible existence. And this particular day will stay with me forever because it was the first time I'd ever got close to a coastal wolf. Up to this point every time I'd tried to sneak up on them or get close in my little rubber boat, they'd slink off into the forest. They really were the ghosts of this coast. But for some reason on this particular day she was confident enough to hang out with me. And because it was the first I'd got close to her I was shaking with adrenaline. It wasn't because I was scared. There's no reason to be scared of wolves. It was because I was so excited. Luckily she was very relaxed. She relaxed. She yawned, she stuck her tongue out, and it meant I could stop taking blurry, shaky pictures. Now I could take sharp pictures. The only problem was towards the end of her yawn she did this, and my blood got pumping again, and I went back to taking blurry pictures. Now this female is the leader of her pack. She's the alpha female. Here she is with the alpha male, and you can see there the coastal home that they live in. And in this pack there were nine individuals, including four very, very cute pups. Three of them are pictured here with the alpha female there. They're just beautifully camouflaged. Now it was such an honor, you know, so special to have this secret window into the hidden lives of coastal wolves. It's something that very few people on the planet have experienced, so I felt incredibly grateful that that happened. Now about six months after I returned home I received one of the most horrible messages I've ever received because attached to that message was this picture. That wolf and one of her pups had been shot and thrown in a local fishing village dumpster. Now if she'd been called Cecil, if she'd been a lion, there would have been outcry across the world. But because she's a coastal wolf, not many people know about coastal wolves, so who cares? And so absolutely nothing happened, and this happens far too often with wildlife. We've gotta find more ways to live alongside it, particularly with these big predators. And I think the first step towards doing that is valuing them more. So ever since then, ever since I got that message, I knew I had to return to Vancouver Island. Firstly to show how awesome these coastal wolves are, but also use them as flagships to celebrate the amazing west coast ecosystem within which they live.

So I had a grant from the Scientific Exploration Society in the U.K., and I had a young explorer's grant from the National Geographic Society here. I pitched to National Geographic a series, and this now has become Nat Geo Wild's first digital series. So where is Vancouver Island? Let's zoom in. So it's just off mainland Canada, near the U.S. border, and I was about halfway up on the west coast. And it's an amazing, amazing ecosystem. In the winter it's absolutely hammered by waves. It's one of the best places in the world for storm watching, and there you can see you've got this wave battered Pacific west coast, and then there's rainforest coasted mountains that drop straight down to the shoreline. It's not tropical rainforest, it's temperate rainforest, and it's incredibly green, incredibly luscious. And behind that wave battered front line is this neverending network of sheltered sea inlets, and that's one of the best places to find animals. Now crazy landscape by itself, but to then be packed full of big sexy, charismatic animals from gray whales to humpback whales. These are 45 tons, 50 feet long, they're absolutely giants, to bald eagles, and these guys are master fishermen, and they're also huge. They've got a massive wing span, six feet wing span. Phew! And then there's the cuter stuff. Now I think of sea otters as like the Derrick Zoolanders of the animal kingdom. They're always pulling a pose. This guy hasn't quite mastered blue steel, but he's getting there, so it's a bit of a pout. And this guy, I think he's stretching out a bit of a calf cramp. Yeah, they're all so big. You think sea otters are cute, oh... Raccoons, the bandits, the masked bandits, they're on another level. Now I have a bit of a crazy theory about raccoons. I believe they are plotting the end of the world. Now they were pretty shocked to hear that I discovered their plan, and the only thing they could really do after they discovered I foiled their plan was to go and get a drink at the bar.

So as I said, it's temperate rainforest this place, so it's pretty much impenetrable to go walking, especially with big cameras and tripods. So I was searching for the wolves in my little 12-foot zodiac. It was called Striker. I was filming mainly from the boat, from the water, but where possible I did get out on land, and I spent a lot of time in blinds. And having had those amazing experiences with coastal wolves in the past, I went into this pretty confident that I could find coastal wolves, but they were just giving me the runaround. I was getting absolutely nothing. They were ghosts. Now this coast receives a huge amount of rainfall, and often it's difficult to stay out when the weather is miserable. But I had this idea that I needed to stay out in all conditions because that could be when you get lucky. So this is myself in a little hailstorm. This is really nice. It wasn't, it was miserable. Now this particular area of shoreline is really cool because it's the sanctuary for about eight females, and of course females means cubs. And the best part about these particular bears was that the only thing that they're scared of is a bigger bear or a pack of wolves. And the only place that comes from is the forest. So if you're in a boat on the water, they completely ignore you. And that's awesome because you can get really, really close and film natural behavior, and you can get really, really close. This is a juvenile bear that, it actually got a little bit curious, came over to check me out. Where possible I did get out on land to walk with the bears. Now when a bear comes really close, it's important to stay calm. And with black bears I should say, I just have a chat with it because if you have a chat with it, it's relaxed, you're relaxed, everyone's safe. Okay, we're here. We're here, okay. That's a good bear, go around. Okay, go around. Go around, good bear. And then everyone's happy. When I first went to Vancouver Island, I wanted to get my camera even closer than this. So whilst I was at high school I built this. It's called Bear Box, and it's basically an indestructible housing for my camera. And this is me and my design and technology teacher, Mr. Sullivan, and this was the first shot taken inside Bear Box. We didn't really know how the bears were gonna react. It turns out they kinda liked it. But it did mean that I could get the camera really, really close to them with a wide angle lens, so they're big in the frame with their habitat behind. And you can see here that they're walking on the shoreline. Like clockwork these bears would come out of the forest every day at low tide when the water in the inlets goes out to forage. They were foraging in a pretty cool way, so I'm just gonna let a little clip from episode two explain what they were doing.

We've come out nice and early this morning to look for bears. It's nice and clear, so I can see a long, long way. Yeah, we've got a bear on the shoreline just there. Awesome, right? We're gonna approach slowly, and hopefully it hangs out. Wow, really excited. You might be wondering why a bear would hang out on the shoreline, or why it's flipping rocks. So many rocks. Just found out this is a young male bear because he has a big set of balls. Well, he's on the hunt for his next meal. Crabs. Lots and lots of crabs.

So I was having great luck with the bears, filming them on the rocky shore, but still the wolves were giving me the runaround. Wildlife is weird when you try to film or photograph it because had I said I wanna make a film about black bears, well I would have seen no black bears and loads of coastal wolves. That's just how it works. And all the other animals were putting on an amazing show. I had loads of really cool encounters with orca, killer whales. The orca in this particular area are transient, and one of their favorite foods are these guys, stellar sea lions. Now these sea lions are pretty formidable predators in their own right. The males are not very pretty. They can be 2,000 pounds, 11 feet long. They're absolutely monsters, and when they're on land they're pretty ugly. They're just these big fat blobs of blubber. And I wanted to make an episode about them, but I didn't think it was fair to only film them when they were hauled out on the rocky shore. So I decided to get in the water with them. And I wasn't really sure how they were gonna react to the camera and the lights and things. Turns out they kinda liked me. Now this doesn't look like a brilliant situation to be in, so I'm gonna let a little clip explain what exactly is going on.

That was amazing. We sat right down on the bottom on the sand, and there must have had, I don't know, 15, 20 of them all around us. At one point I had one over either shoulder. And then one gripped me on the head and squeezed and squeezed, and I was like okay, that's a little bit hard. But the whole time it doesn't feel like they're being aggressive. It feels like, I mean, they don't have arms. If they wanna know what a new funky object feels like, they can't use their hands, they don't have any. They've gotta just have a little bite, and so it's very much a loving, tender bite, rather than an aggressive I wanna eat you bite. Now ironically it was actually one of the smallest sea lions on this rocky hole that came closest to killing me. I was suspicious of this particular sea lion because all the others went around in groups, whereas this one always went around by itself. And it learned that grabbing on my regulator hose, my breathing hose, and pulling it out of my mouth was really fun because it made bubbles that it could then play in. Now of course this was scary the first time, but once I kind of worked out what he was doing I flipped the camera around so I could see him coming. In the reflection of my underwater housing I could see him coming over my shoulder, and yeah, I tried to catch him in the act. Little rascals.

So I wasn't having much luck with the wolves, so I decided to mix things up, and traveled further up the coast, and went to this really remote island. The only way really of getting in there at this time of year was by float plane. This was my bad ass pilot Doug, and he could basically get us into anywhere. He dropped us off on this incredibly beautiful section of coastline, this great bit of beach. So we set up camp, and we were miles and miles from civilization. So we often left the tent doors open at night so that we could, you know, see the Milky Way, and yeah, it was really, really cool. This is a time lapse. And this isn't actually the sun rising. That's the moon rising in the middle of the night, which was kinda cool, nice surprise. So I set up a blind. The weather wasn't great to start with. Set up a blind basically to break up my human outline. Animals, including wolves, are evolutionary programmed to be scared of our head and shoulders shape. So you set up a blind, break up that outline, and the idea is that they don't know that you're there. So this was in the hide. Everything was lovely. Well, 12 days later... things weren't going great. I saw absolutely nothing. Saw many beautiful sunrises, beautiful sunsets, bald eagles flying past, black bears, kingfishes, everything apart from coastal wolves. And we decided to pull the plug and move to a new location. And just as we were doing so we realized why we might not have seen any coastal wolves.

Now if you look up in the top of that picture, it's a big section of logging. Now I knew that there was logging on Vancouver Island, but I didn't really expect to see it. And to actually be waiting for wolves, and to be able to put your fingers in your ears and look out over this beautiful coast, take your fingers out your ears and you can hear chainsaws and trees and machinery. So we walked up to see what the logging was like. And I don't wanna point the finger at loggers. I guess the one thing that, you know, we're all part of this problem. We all use paper, we all use wood. I guess the one thing I would say is that when I was in high school we were taught that the cutting down of rainforests happened in the Amazon, in a far away place, and it was a problem that was difficult to deal with. Well you know, this is the logging of temperate rainforest. That tree that I'm sitting on was cut down maybe that day, a few days earlier, could be 500 years old. Other trees there are a thousand years old. And I think in the 21st century there's gotta be an alternative to cutting down these old growth temperate rainforests on this coastline. This is on the developed world's doorstep. If we can't look after this place, what hope does anywhere else have? So this was pretty upsetting, so I went back to my tent. I got in my happy place. I snuggled with my cameras and regrouped. And two days later, this happened. Now I'm not actually allowed to tell you what happened next. If you'd like to find out, you're gonna have to follow the rest of the series. I'd just like to thank you all for coming. That's all I've got to say. I hope you have a great rest of your evening.

A Quest to Find Canada’s Elusive Coastal Wolf

While working as a deckhand on a bear and whale-watching vessel off the west coast of Vancouver Island after high school, Bertie Gregory fell in love with the coastal wolf. After heartbreaking news that one of the wolves he photographed had been killed, Gregory knew he had to go back to help raise awareness for the conservation of the species. While searching for the elusive wolf, Gregory encounters a diverse array of other species, including bears, sea otters, and raccoons. Gregory takes the stage to share photos and stories from his time in the field shooting his web series "wild_life with bertie gregory."

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C. New clips air every Monday.